essays | fiction | poetry | photography | art
Tiffin clangs like bells,
collapses as it climbs,
tiffin holds okra, paneer,
sambar, and lemon rice.
The fish
fillets are thawing
for their pan-fried debut.
If there’s one thing one can observe in a residential care home, it is the necessity of humour throughout life. It is true that the human body ages in a cycle. Through life we travel the circumference of a circle. We begin a reliant baby, we start to learn, we grow up, become an adult,…
giddy with the scent
we pipette the peppermint
into the mixture
The first important thing in making fermented cabbage is to choose a good cabbage head.
a cheeping beak breaks forth
scenting balmy air:
swirls of hyacinths waft
in warm, hour-less days –
Olive the (lion) dog. Image by Andrea Farrow, via Instagram The mane streams behind the dog as it tears across weathered gray floorboards. “Frickin’ lion.” The seven-second Instagram reel auto-loops on my Thursday lunch hour and I become obsessed with this dog that I later find out belongs to my colleague Jessica’s sister, Andrea. I…
I stepped off the plane in Helsinki – airport code HEL – and found a restroom. Standing at a urinal, I heard birdsong piped through overhead speakers: odd, soothing, out of place. The train to downtown Helsinki departs from a giant, cool tunnel many meters below street level. The platform is nearly empty. Massive faux-tapestries…
Blood orange, the pith and peel of it,
sluicing into nails and the cuts
I hadn’t known were there.
How many fried eggs do I have to eat to heal these broken bones?
I am a student in a creative writing programme, a mature student, from a professional background as an epidemiologist. Amongst ourselves, we students don’t really talk about ‘creativity’. We talk a lot about craft and sometimes we talk about ourselves and the way in which how we feel affects our writing. But rarely about ‘creativity’…
I stood under the alligator juniper that shaded my tent in the oak woods. Effie squatted between my feet. In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade called his receptionist Effie. But the Effie at my feet was no lady. I called her F. E. Cottontail in my journals. Cottontails are coprophagous – literally, Fecal Eating. That…
last night i carved open
a tree in the yard and
at the centre of the
trunk was a small
knife
The trees are prettier this time of year, limp—
gowned in sweet milk stuck to our tongues.
In early October 2020, my partner Greg and I drove at sunrise to Zion National Park in southern Utah. On the way I swigged coffee and snapped photos of sandstone cliffs dip-dyed red by the sun. They dwarfed what I’d imagined while planning our pandemic-adapted vacation – a national park tour via road trip, starting…
It was the temperamental radio,
the cats with full bellies,
the hilarious stench of fuel
“You made it, Grandma!” I said as I gave her a hug. The gold tassel swished in my face from the graduation cap I hadn’t removed yet. “I’ve been to all your graduations, Iha,” she replied in a huff, “And, I’ll be at the next one.” I gripped her hand as she steadied herself with…
I try bleaching the sun
using liquid soda crystals
but the sky turns yellow too
breathe and /hold
lungs and belly
moon balloon full
The weeks that followed exploded into a patriotic frenzy. Red, white, and blue dotted every neighborhood – even our own. Old Navy’s Fourth of July T-shirts reemerged for the last few weeks of September. Dad brought home a flag – taller than me – which I demanded be hung by the front door, just like…
the slow inflections of the wind
where rivers run like scars.
The moon hangs quietly
in the blackened air, halved and emptied, decaying since dusk
Here lie abandoned gyro crusts and Bundt cake crumbs.
Your fingers shine with olive oil grease
New York is often unfairly maligned for being unfeeling, but that’s just what we call uncontrollable things, which the city is. It tumbles on, transforming a million times over the course of a decade before remaining stagnant for far too long. Occasionally, shifts rise rapidly from seismic events. I’ve seen sudden pivots in the wake…
I dreamed of teeth
cracking teeth walnut
shells my cheek
hot on your back
waking
at midnight
to piss
on the sand dunes
and the sky overhead
like a badly
scratched frying pan.
In an ideal world
the washing machine
is a portal to clean linen
dishes lean back like sun
loungers by the sink
What springs from earth dissolves to earth again, and heaven-born things fly to their native seat.Marcus Aurelius ‘It’s about a third full,’ I say, clutching the mobile phone to my ear as I hang my head into the water tank, my voice bouncing off the metal sides and echoing back at me. ‘Does the pipe…
a chant begins
a loud doleful wail
smear my body in holy oil
adorn my head with your crown of thorns
It’s not that she wasn’t happy for her sister, far from it. Nadia only wished she could hold on to her for a little longer.
My soles are gelatinous, a mixture of blood, and yoke.
my father wanted to recreate the grapes
grow his own over our tiny backyard in the suburbs just outside the city
his vision was three separate plants,
arching and twisting their vines from our neighbor’s garage to ours
I swirl my eyes inside the paint
tears forming at the edges of me
January and the New Year are often dreaded in their insistence that we look back on what we have achieved, or what we meant to. This year, the looming of March feels the same, with its marking of the anniversary of the initial lockdown. It is easy to be hard on the progress you have…
I sway and I spin, I smile. Sometimes even in perfect moments, you begin to feel the cold creep in.
and what does it mean
that her blood still sings
through the Old Quarter
of my veins?
Through photography and sculpture, I question how the manipulation of behaviour and patterns dehumanises society.
Because of the pandemic, we didn’t have any Olympics this summer, so I decided to reproduce the Olympic coverage in July by printing (screen printing) over selected pictures from the Montreal Olympics of 1976
Through countless retrievals, our memories of precious moments lose their ‘truth.’
The prolific New York art scene gained momentum in the 1950s through the subversive Beat movement and the experimental first-generation New York School of poets. Both celebrated community and were integral in inaugurating a defiance of the mainstream and the innovation of art as collaborative. These artistic coteries shared geographical proximity; personal relationships; and similar…
Beneath the light of a bashful demilune,
the water appears quite black, like blood on snow.
Last night they were alive again, flying through the air at break-bone speed, but they didn’t break.
The goats have come down
from the hills today.
With each dawn, dialogue, and downturn – downpours, too ergonomics and economies dictate energy. Economic impacts expand far beyond employment and stories drop – downstairs in the kitchen, too. Hope blooms eternal, the saying goes. Spring, too. Perennials – candy cane sorrels and blue grape hyacinths. Annuals – geraniums, impatiens. Patiently impatient. Waiting for the…
There is an art to falling. Sacrificing soul, limb and touch to the whim of this tempest. To cross that distance, to breach that space is not the effect of passion, but of passivity. It is the ultimate paradox. To shut off all senses but one, to enfeeble the power of the ever-wandering mind, until…
